


do you like me? yes/no

by banana_pattern_camo



Series: Patriots Era Bosselot [1]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, though kind of bittersweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:49:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29788755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/banana_pattern_camo/pseuds/banana_pattern_camo
Summary: summer 1970. patriots meetings are boring, and john and adam are neglecting to do any work.
Relationships: Big Boss/Ocelot (Metal Gear)
Series: Patriots Era Bosselot [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2207466
Kudos: 11





	do you like me? yes/no

**Author's Note:**

> it seems i can't write simple fluff without also referencing some of the canonical doom and gloom, but on the whole this is just some probably out of character, mostly light-hearted bosselot banter.

Major Zero, John reasons with himself, is a respectable ally and could certainly be considered a friend. It’s even possible that he might be considered likeable by some people, though don’t quote him on that.  
  
But there are occasions, and this is one of them, when the good Major considerably tries John’s patience.

  
It’s a summer’s afternoon in 1970, the members of the recently-formed Patriots gathered together in Zero’s office for yet another of his scintillating meetings. The old bastard has been droning on for what seems like hours, pacing backwards and forwards at the front of the room, gesturing now and then with his swagger stick at various diagrams pinned to the wall.  
  
The rays of bright sunlight streaming into the hot and stuffy room, dust particles dancing in the glow, are only hindering John’s concentration, and making him sleepy.  
He finds his eye drifting to the window more than once, feeling increasingly as if he’s back at school, waiting in agonising boredom for the bell to ring.

  
To John’s left at their table is Para-Medic - or Dr. Clark, he should say, but that sounds too stuffy; he prefers her codename - and to the left of her, Mr. Sigint.  
  
The latter appears to have finally given up on his gallant attempt to seem interested in the Major’s speech, and Para-Medic isn’t faring any better.  
While she is at least, in contrast to Sigint’s reclining figure, sitting upright and looking in the Major’s general direction, John would bet his good eye and a leg that she hasn’t heard a word he’s said for the past ten minutes.  
Probably lost in some bizarre daydream involving whatever movie monster she’s currently obsessed with.  
  
And on John’s right, who else, of course, but Adam. Now twenty-six, he’s grown into his sharp features, all cutting cheekbones and strong jawline. Immaculately dressed, crisp shirt and tie, same red gloves as always.  
  
Oddly, there’s a serene expression on the blonde’s face as he doodles on the paper in front him. John hopes it’s from innocent daydreams of cowboys, but knowing Adam, it’s probably something a lot darker.  
  
John fidgets, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He leans forward, pretends to make some notes, abandons it when he realises the Major is far too absorbed in his own oration to pay attention to his audience.  
He glances across at Sigint, smirks as he catches him almost nodding off, eyes jerking open and blinking rapidly at John before returning a knowing grin.  
_  
_ Just then there’s a rustling beside him, and John feels a piece of folded up paper being pressed into his hand. He nearly snorts out loud as he realises it’s from Adam, apparently so bored that he’s resorted to passing notes under the desk like a school kid.  
  
Unfolding the paper, he’s met with a variety of doodles, including a charming caricature of Zero with a bullet hole in his head, two X’s for eyes to fully emphasise his fate, and a cat with a smoking revolver in its paw drawn lovingly next to it.  
  
At the bottom of the page, written in neat Russian Cyrillic, is the age-old question, “Do you like me?” ; with three tick-boxes labeled “Yes”, “Yes!” and “Yes a lot and I’m going to suck you off later” provided next to it.  
  
Without a moment’s hesitation, John draws a fourth box, labels it in slightly wonky Cyrillic “No”, and firmly ticks it.  
  
The exaggerated glare from Adam as he receives his answer is enough to cause a genuine grin to stretch across John’s face, but it’s unfortunate that Major Zero picks this moment to look across at him and notice it, saying in that smarmy, stiff-upper-lip-chaps voice of his, “Glad you’re enjoying yourself, Jack. I’ll take that as encouragement to extend my talk a little longer. Now, if you could all direct your attention towards this graph for a moment-”  
  
  
Adam’s exasperated eyeroll is a thing of beauty.

  
\---

  
But all torture comes to an end, and eventually the meeting is adjourned.  
John returns to the peace and quiet of his own office, ends up sat at his desk with Adam perched sideways on his lap, both of them abandoning any further attempts at being productive that day.  
  
He leisurely makes his way through a cigar, watches the smoke drifting across the room, whilst Adam absently uses his knife to sharpen the pencils on his desk to a probably lethal point.  
  
“That was the most boring hour of my life to date,” remarks Adam presently.  
  
“Mm. Almost as dull as your cowboy films.”  
  
“Dick. Cowboys are cool. And way more interesting than stupid sci-fi aliens, at least.”  
  
“Ah. Been getting to know Para-Medic, have you?”  
  
“Unfortunately. Didn’t have much of a choice.”  
  
John smiles. “You don’t like her?” he asks, somewhat unnecessarily, really, because he knows the list of people that Adam genuinely _likes_ is pitifully small.  
  
“She’s annoying. Always talking to you about her stupid movies. That’s my job.”

  
John scoffs, taps the ash off his cigar, smirks a little as some of it “accidentally” falls onto Adam’s pristine white shirt. “Jealous, are we?”  
  
In lieu of a response, Adam just scowls, finishes sharpening the last pencil and jabs it into John's arm to test his handiwork. He smiles at John’s indignant yelp as it draws a tiny spot of blood, then sobers up a little, turning in the other man’s lap to straddle him properly so that they’re face to face.  
  
“Look, I don’t expect you to take this with anything more than a pinch of salt, but - there’s just, I don’t know, something about her that I don’t trust. I can’t explain it, she just makes me a little - uneasy. Be careful, John, that’s all.”  
  
“If you say so.” John answers him seriously, respects Adam’s judgement even if he finds it very hard to believe in his own mind that the endearingly nutty medic has any room left in her Godzilla-filled head for evil plottings.  
  
They fall back into an easy silence, exchanging lazy kisses here and there. It’s that kind of languid summer’s day when it seems impossible to act with any sense of urgency or purpose. Even the roar of traffic outside seems lazier than usual, drivers honking at each other with only a half-hearted malice.  
  
Inevitably, Adam’s hands end up tangled in John’s hair. He’s not wearing a bandana today, hair falling loose instead, and Adam seems to enjoy carding his fingers through the dark curls.  
  
At some point, John becomes aware that his eye-patch is getting uncomfortable, the heat making it irritating to wear any kind of garment or accessory at all, really. He gently stills Adam’s fingers for a moment while he peels off the eye-patch, sighs a little as the air hits the rough skin underneath.  
Predictably, Adam presses a kiss there, before twirling John’s hair around his fingers once more and lightly massaging his scalp.  
  
John relaxes into it, closes his eye for a minute, before placing a hand on Adam’s neck to draw him in for a longer, open-mouthed kiss. Adam reciprocates willingly, gently bites at John’s lip a little, then pulls away to remark in a mocking tone, “Thought you didn’t like me.”  
  
John snorts as he remembers the note from earlier that Adam’s referring to. He’s still got it, crumpled up in his pocket, and he takes it out now, smooths it out a little and hands it to Adam with a hint of a smirk.  
  
“Ask me again, and maybe I’ll give you a different answer.”  
  
Adam narrows his eyes, but takes it anyway, leans over a little precariously to rest it on the desk as he scribbles something down.  
  
When the paper is returned to him, John is met with a different question: “Do you think cowboys are cool?” - with a single answer box labelled “ Yes!!!”.  
  
Grinning, he takes the pencil from Adam, and after some internal debate, he decides to be charitable, and simply ticks the box provided.  
  
A blonde eyebrow is raised. “You do?”  
  
“Yeah.”

Adam considers for a moment. “OK. Who’s your favourite cowboy?”  
  
“Uhhhh. John Wayne?”  
  
Adam snorts. “He’s an actor, not a real cowboy. Nice try, but no cigar.”  
  
“Did you think I was gonna say you?”  
  
“ _No_. Of course not.”  
  
“Ah, so you are at least aware that you’re not actually a cowboy.”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
  
John does just that, but as they return to kissing in the haze of sunlight and cigar smoke, he can’t help but think about that crumpled piece of paper, letting a wave of nostalgia for something neither of them have ever really known wash over him.  
  
It’s something he’s guilty of, now and then; wondering what could have been, dwelling on pointless what-ifs.  
  
He knows it’s futile, but when they’re sitting here, laughing together and making stupid conversation like teenagers, and the sunbeams are casting a heavenly glow around the tip of Adam’s hair, John can’t help but succumb to thoughts of what it might have been like to meet under different circumstances, in different lives.  
  
How _would_ they even meet, he wonders. What if they were never military men at all? Met as, God forbid, college students. Maybe Adamska’s cowboy obsession would have taken him to America on an exchange programme or something.  
  
He shakes his head with a wry smile. Nice though the idea is, he just can’t imagine Adam as a regular student, not unless there was a degree in torture methods on offer. It’s hard to even imagine him as a child, for that matter.   
  
Adam has never really spoken much of his childhood, so John can’t help but wonder.  
Did he ever go to a normal school, play with a football in the dirt, pull on the girls’ pigtails like a normal boy? Or was his whole life dictated by the Philosophers, with some stuffy private tutor to give him his lessons in solitude, filling his young head with someone else’s warped ideologies?  
  
Well, if he thinks about it for too long, he gets an unfamiliar ache in his chest that he’d rather avoid, so John shelves that thought for now.  
  
All in all, it’s a moot point, he supposes, because the past is the past and there’s no sense in looking back, only forward.  
  
But it doesn’t stop him from occasionally entertaining the thought of some alternate versions of Adam and himself.  
  
Not to the extreme of imagining the roses around the front door, and Adam’s cheery “Honey, I’m home!” ringing through their nice, airy suburban house as John makes apple pie in the kitchen, a pair of placid civilians through and through - no, that image is quite vomit-inducing; but any version of themselves where they are linked together by something purer than the blood-red string of fate of their actual sorry history is a fascinating, if totally alien, concept.

  
\--

  
Abruptly, John’s thoughts make a forced landing back down to Earth, as he finally registers Adam prodding him in the chest persistently.  
  
“Hey. _Hey._ ” The fingertips begin poking his cheeks. “What are you wasting your limited braincells on this time?”  
  
John grabs the blonde’s hands, holds them firmly away from his face, looks into Adam’s eyes and considers for a moment as if he’s marshalling his thoughts.  
  
“I was thinking about wearing a frilly pink apron and cooking home-made apple pie for you,” he states, and smiles at the anticipated burst of laughter.  
  
“What the fuck?” Adam giggles, taken by surprise. “Are you alright? Did I hit you too hard when we last practiced CQC?”  
  
John just laughs and lets go of his hands, glad that Adam sensed that it was better to just play along and not press John any further.  
  
  
They resume from where they left off, and John allows himself to be coaxed back into the present moment, becoming aware of the afternoon sun once more, notices how the shadows have moved gradually across the room.  
  
It’s too hot to stay in a sombre mood for long, mental gymnastics working up far too much of a sweat, but his brain won’t give up that easily, and as he loosens Adam’s tie and mouths along his collar bone, John can’t shake the uneasy feeling that this current state of affairs is too good to be true.  
  
It reminds him of being a kid in the last term of elementary school; caught up in the joy of summer but unable to ignore the looming prospect of middle school lurking in the back of his mind.  
_Seems as though Adam’s not the only one having uneasy suspicions for no good reason,_ he thinks to himself. 

  
But then again, John reasons, in this line of work you’d be crazy not to be prepared for the worst, prepared for some twist of fate or act of betrayal at every corner.  
  
Granted, there’s nothing much to suggest the Patriots can’t be a successful endeavour, but the pessimist in him can’t help but feel as if these carefree moments with Adam are something to be savoured while they last. 

  
So for now, he lets the feeling of Adam’s soft lips against his own empty his mind of everything else; focuses on the small sigh Adam gives as John's hand snakes underneath his shirt and roams across his hips. 

Inevitably, he ends up reaching for that ticklish spot on Adam's waist which he knows will make the younger man descend into giggles.  
  


They’re caught up in a particularly tense conflict involving strategic positioning of hands and mouths, when there’s a sharp knock at the door that jolts them back to reality, both blinking rapidly as if emerging from a dream.   
  
Adam springs off his lap, perches on the desk instead and frantically attempts to re-arrange his shirt and tie in a manner devoid of his usual feline grace.  
  
The unwelcome sight of Major Zero materialises in the doorway, a glint in his eye suggesting that he has another hour’s worth of egotistical waffle in him yet.  
  
_Ah well_ , thinks John with a sigh, as he flattens his unruly hair and half-heartedly tries to convince himself that his lips aren’t visibly swollen, _there goes the school bell. Looks like playtime’s over for now._  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Big Boss writes coffee shop aus in his head, pass it on.
> 
> Thank you for reading!!! ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ Hope this seasonally inappropriate (at the time of writing) waffle warmed you up a little.  
> Kudos and feedback of any kind greatly appreciated!  
> ヽ(^◇^*)/


End file.
